Chapter Five

Once upon a time there was a golden-haired young princess named Marie. She and her sisters lived in a big country house in a peaceable landscape, with ponies to ride and gardens to run through and servants to watch over them. From time to time, they were taken to visit their grandmother, who was Queen of Half the World.

As Marie grew, she became a beauty, a tall, slim young woman with thick blonde hair and ice-blue eyes. She fell in love with the young man who would—although no one knew it yet—become her country’s king, but being first cousins, her mother’s religion forbad it. Instead, the Duchess of Edinburgh and her mother-in-law, Victoria, chose for Marie the crown prince of a new country on the other side of Europe. Prince Ferdinand, Roman Catholic nephew to the childless king, was physically awkward, socially shy, largely inarticulate, and primarily interested in plants. Had she been less beautiful, less sure of herself, less skilled a horse-woman, he might have been less awkward with her. As it was, he was no match for his bride in anything but position.

That was judged enough. The match was made.

Marie was sad, because she loved her cousin, because her new home was far from her dear sisters, and not least because she had little in common with her new husband. But the blood of the world’s greatest dynasties ran in her veins, and she had been training for the job of Queen from the time she could walk.

Two months after her seventeenth birthday, the English princess became the Roumanian Crown Princess, and went to live in a barbaric place more Ottoman than European, with few railways, no telegraph, and not even a proper palace in its capital city. A country whose language the girl did not speak, whose customs she did not understand, and a husband she barely knew. And when she got there, the old King had expectations: that his heir’s wife would be quiet, and obedient, and tame.

Marie was accustomed to riding out alone on the most spirited of horses, seated astride as she raced paths and jumped hedges. Now she had attendants, and a side-saddle. She lived in the King’s castle and rode the King’s horses and travelled at the King’s whim, making such friends as she was permitted.

The years passed: children, parties, ceremonies.

Not until she was thirty-one, the mother of four in a world of growing turmoil, did she encounter a man who took her seriously. Prince Barbu Știrbey came from a family of boyars prominent since the fifteenth century. Astute, quiet, darkly handsome, and Sorbonne-educated, this high-ranking aristocrat was yet known for his interest in modernising his vast estates. He was also a fine horseman, with a house in the same hill-resort the royal family occupied during the hot summers.

The two met during a time of peasant uprising, when farmers rebelled against the conditions of near-slavery imposed on them by the feudal system of land ownership. Prince Barbu was a patriot to his bones—and to him, that meant a loyalty to the people of Roumania. He taught Marie about the urgent need for democracy, and for agrarian reform—and 32-year-old Marie, venturing into the realm of politics for the first time, convinced her husband, and eventually the King.

It was the beginning of a formidable partnership between a Prince whose family had ruled the land for centuries and a Queen who could barely speak a Roumanian sentence. Gossip flew, naturally, but since neither her husband nor the Prince’s wife showed any hint of offence, there was no fuel to feed scandal’s flames.

The Princess had found firm ground beneath her feet at last, and began to look at Roumania as a home, rather than a place of lonely foreign exile. When she rode out, she spoke with peasants in their fields and housewives at their doors. When her husband and the old King talked, she would look up from her needlework from time to time, and venture questions. She began to wear the richly embroidered traditional clothing her people had given her—at first awkwardly, as a sort of fancy-dress, but then as a way of showing her Roumanian identity. She bore her sixth child in 1913, when she was 38. War broke out in the Balkans. Cholera swept the land, and Marie left her palace each day to tend to the camps of dying soldiers, holding their hands, wiping their brows, listening to their prayers. Over their sick-beds, she fell in love with her people—and in the process, they with her.

Then an Archduke was shot, and a world of long-simmering tensions erupted into the Great War.

Roumania’s King was a German, chosen to establish a new nation’s monarchy. When the War began, his impulse was to declare for the Kaiser, though the majority of Roumanians—along with the English-born Princess Marie—were opposed. The country chose neutrality. When the King died two months later and Ferdinand and Marie took their thrones, neutral it remained. For two years, Marie honed the traditional feminine arts of persuasion, working behind the scenes, among men who laughed at the idea of a beautiful woman with a mind for politics, to convince them that the Central Powers of Germany and Austria were going to lose, and that Roumania’s future lay with the alliance of Russia, France, and England. She and the Prime Minister prevailed, and in August 1916, buoyed by the Allies’ promise of national reunification, Roumania declared war on Austria-Hungary.

The fighting began immediately. Marie donned a Red Cross uniform and spent her days nursing the sick and wounded. In November, her three-year-old son died of typhoid. In December, Bucharest fell, and the government and royal family fled to a small, starving enclave trapped between Russia and the Central Powers. Injured soldiers came on every train; the army grew short of bullets for its German-made guns; food dwindled. In late 1917, the Bolsheviks swept across Russia, murdering Marie’s cousin and all his family, lining up the army’s officers for execution, leaving Roumania a tiny island surrounded by enemies who snarled over her bones and sent assassins after the royal family.

Shaky treaties were signed, to save the remnants of the country, yet still the army was slaughtered. Bucharest and the countryside were stripped bare by occupying troops. By the time Armistice was declared, half its soldiers, nearly one in ten of its citizens, were dead. The countryside was ravaged, the capital city was a husk.

And yet, when the royal family arrived back in Bucharest, the starving populace exploded in joy—and their love was directed in most part at the Queen who had nursed them, comforted them, grieved with them, and shared both their sufferings and their determination to prevail.

A year later, when Roumania’s Prime Minister failed at the Peace Conference, Marie rode into Paris and threw all her forty-four years of royal wit and charm into the masculine business of negotiating a fair settlement. She fixed her mesmerising blue eyes on Clemenceau, Curzon, and Churchill, until all but the tight-laced American President were eating from her graceful, if work-hardened hands. When she returned to her home, she brought with her all the long-lost provinces of greater Roumania, and laid them at the feet of her beloved adopted homeland.

There was one final fairy-tale touch to the story.

On the edge of Transylvania, the biggest and richest of those returned provinces, stood a small castle beside a mountain pass. Built in the fourteenth century as customs post and border defence, it was visible for miles, a blunt, workaday fortress rather than an aristocrat’s home. As centuries passed, the Ottoman threat came and went, weapons changed, borders shifted. The castle was taken over by Hungary, then returned to the city fathers of nearby Brașov, then sold to a Transylvanian Prince before returning to Brașov again. It was used to house Austrian troops, then became the headquarters of the Forestry department.

In 1920, the Brașov city fathers desperately presented it to their new country’s Queen. Not that they expected much more of her than the occasional visit and a willingness to keep the walls standing. After all, her main summer residence was only thirty miles away, on the other side of the former border.

But instead of polite dismay, Queen Marie embraced their gift with all the passion in her romantic heart. Its evocative outline, its derelict state, its location in territory she herself had brought to Roumania—Castle Bran was the stuff of dreams, which came to her at a time when her daughters were marrying, her sons growing away from her, her husband ageing into himself. She had been given at last the opportunity to create a home that was not in the corners granted by any King. Castle Bran was hers, as no person or place had been since she’d married at the age of seventeen.

Renovations were gentle, gardening extensive, happiness complete. The Queen came to Bran as often as she could, to ride through the hillsides and entertain friends and spend happy hours with the gardeners. She stepped back from the international stage and worked on her writing, publishing books and articles about her homeland for American and English readers. Photographers would visit and capture this dignified figure, whose mature beauty the camera loved, posing among the flower beds in her Roumanian embroidered costumes and wimple-like head-scarf that covered her middle-aged chins.

The fairy-tale princess, born to royalty, embraced by commoners, could now retire to her mountain-top keep with her books and her triumphs and her youngest daughter, and be happy at last.

In some fairy tales, happily ever after is where things end.

In others, happiness is where the problems begin.